Natalia Pane of Child Trends on Big Data, Research, Funding, and Being a Great Employer for Women

Through the Noise #197
Natalia Pane // Senior Vice President for Research and Operations // Child Trends

Today we’re joined by Natalia Pane of Child Trends who manages to make even the Government Accoutability Movement sound compelling. As Senior Vice President for Research and Operations, Ms. Pane has her hand in many facets of running the nonprofit Child Trends — a research organization focused on improving the lives of children and their families. As a research organization, their work can be considered successful even when they discover that something is not working — when they can prove a program or strategy is ineffective or even harmful and eliminate it. This can have positive impacts for children, families, and other organizations by publishing the results and making them widely available, although as Ms. Pane points out, many publications are loathe to publish findings that are negative so they make their research known to their 25,000 subscribers and other followers. Beyond the research, Natalia Pane walks us through some of the ways Child Trend is succeeding on the human resources front and how they became listed as 39th best employer in the country for women.

For more than 20 years, Natalia Pane has worked closely with the leadership of government agencies, foundations, and nonprofits to collect and use better data—from federal statistics to performance measures—to improve children’s lives. Her work and commentary has appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribute, CNN, NBC News, and Huffington Post Parents amo­­­­­­­­ng others, and she now oversees about 110 research staff and is responsible for ensuring the effective management, strategic growth, and quality of research and workplace at Child Trends (see https://www.linkedin.com/in/npane). Child Trends is the nation’s leading nonprofit research organization focused exclusively on improving the lives and prospects of children and youth; is #18 and #39 in the country for best places to work for recent grads and women (http://reviews.greatplacetowork.com/child-trends); and is growing so check the website for job postings http://www.childtrends.org/careers.